Inside Kentucky’s Recruiting Roadblocks: A Deep Dive into JMI, NIL, and Closing-Table Drama

By JACOB POLACHECK AND JACK PILGRIM

Questions surround Kentucky basketball recruiting as the early signing period has come and gone without a single commitment. As more and more of the nation’s top prospects come off the board, the Wildcats are left with a narrow group of prospects, including five-stars Tyran Stokes, Christian Collins, and Caleb Holt, to hone in on. 

KSR has talked to numerous sources across the college basketball and recruiting landscape over the past month to get answers on why Kentucky has yet to land a 2026 recruit. The answers display a wide range of issues, including JMI’s involvement, negative recruiting against Mark Pope, and emotions at the closing table. 

“I think we’re really excited about where we are,” Pope said immediately following the early signing period in November. “I think we’re feeling incredibly optimistic about retaining players, about adding some really special high school players, and being great in the transfer portal. I think we feel great about it, actually. We’re super excited.”

Despite Pope’s comments, Kentucky’s on-court product, as well as its recruiting success, has been undoubtedly in question. Here is what KSR found, starting with UK’s new deal with JMI, which has been among the greatest hurdles thus far.

The JMI Connection

The University of Kentucky and JMI made headlines in August when they reached an agreement to extend their partnership through 2040 for a multimedia rights agreement valued at $465 million. As part of that agreement, JMI created the BBNIL Suite that serves as Kentucky’s in-house NIL collective. Through it, athletes can broker deals with UK’s 200+ official partners, or try to find their own third-party deals; however, Mitch Barnhart himself admitted the latter may be trickier than the former, as the university strives to protect the brand.

“It gives us an opportunity so that our partners are somewhat protected,” Barnhart said of BBNIL Suite in August when the deal was announced. “The intellectual property, institutional property; it’s really important that if people want to use our marks, use our facilities for part of their endorsement property, that’s part of the deal. You come to the University of Kentucky, and you’re part of our family, and you get to use our things, but also that’s part of the relationship. There’s a responsibility and a right that comes with that.”

Since that agreement was finalized, Kentucky basketball has not landed a player on the recruiting trail. KSR has learned that JMI is playing a role in Kentucky’s slow start to the 2026 recruiting cycle.

In talking to sources, JMI, in conjunction with the UK basketball staff, is requiring prospective student-athletes to sign away NIL rights that would normally be untouched at any other school. A highly structured brand partnership agreement is something uncommon at other schools, but it is something Kentucky has pursued in accordance with JMI, making this arrangement unique to the current landscape of college basketball recruiting.

“I will say that Kentucky is the only school I’ve dealt with that even has anything remotely like this in their contracts,” one anonymous source said.

A Lack of Clarity in NIL

Kentucky has shown a lack of clarity in NIL conversations this cycle, according to sources directly involved in high-level recruitments. KSR talked to someone involved in a recruitment this fall who said that Kentucky was unwilling to give “direct answers” on NIL, while other schools were more transparent.

“Kentucky was asking, ‘How could we get it done? How could we get it done?’ They were talking about how we could get something done with no direction on where they are from an NIL perspective,” one source said. “We didn’t really get a hard number until it was late in the game.” 

That same source said that Kentucky was refusing to bring up hard numbers from revenue share and marketing. Instead, Kentucky was looking to find out numbers from competitors.

“You’re telling me nobody knows, but we have other schools telling us hard numbers from their rev share and marketing, those types of agreements on the back end,” the source said. “I think they kind of knew what their number was, but they tried to save all their money, banking on getting Tyran [Stokes]. It pushed a lot of the other recruits away. You’re acting with us like you don’t know a number, but then other schools are telling us a number. You’re saying this space is so unknown, but how is it unknown when you have 10 other schools telling you a number, and one other school not telling you a number?”

“Kentucky tries to cover as many categories as possible when in negotiations for that money,” one agent with direct dealings with UK told KSR. “It’s like a marketing guarantee where they pay an up-front fee, whatever it is, and they try to use the player’s name, image, and likeness to recoup that money through endorsements and company sponsors.”

Another source mentioned the lack of clarity in NIL as a big issue in another recruitment. It wasn’t just the total NIL number, but the distribution between revenue sharing and organic NIL, which has to be passed through the Deloitte-developed platform NIL Go, that was unclear.

“You have the revenue sharing, which is the school’s NIL, and then you have the potential outside collectives,” one source said. “They’re not a star yet. They’re just a college basketball player. For me, the attention they had was more on the latter, more about the brand and the official partnership. I want to see the real number. This is not it.”

Emotions at the Closing Table

Even prior to JMI’s partnership extension and control over the in-house collective with the current high school cycle, Kentucky had its fair share of misses in Pope’s first two portal classes and the previous high school class. The Wildcats would get to the closing table as favorites or top contenders, at minimum, but leave empty-handed.

What went wrong? In many cases, sources indicated that the new head coach’s emotions would complicate the black and white of a simple negotiation. 

“In negotiations, you can’t have emotions involved. We’re all just doing a job here,” one source directly involved in multiple recruitments said. “Mark, I think he takes it so personal – which is good in a way, but not in negotiations. At the end of the day, I don’t give a **** where my kid goes as long as the people do what they say they’re going to do, ‘We get him better and we do good business.’ But it was really hard to do good business because his emotions got in the way of everything.”

In the trenches of these back-and-forths, sources said Pope would take offense to revised demands or competing schools upping their offers, struggling to grasp how big-time recruitments unfold in today’s world.

“[He’d say,] ‘This is Kentucky. We’re not getting in a bidding war.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, well then that’s your risk if you want to lose him,’” one source said. “… I don’t think he knows how to play in that sandbox yet. I don’t think he knows how to play in this game yet. … Pope has never done this type of business before getting here. He didn’t have to deal with superstars at BYU. He’s getting used to it.”

It’s Not All About NIL 

NIL isn’t the only factor in many of these recruitments, and Kentucky has sometimes missed on players by no fault of its own. Take the recruitment of New Mexico guard Donovan Dent this offseason, for example.

Dent, a 6-foot-2 guard out of Riverside, CA, was considered one of the top players in the transfer portal this offseason. His high school coach, Josh Giles of Centennial High School (Corona, CA), played a key role in his portal recruitment, taking calls from college coaches across the country, including Mark Pope.

“I don’t think Kentucky did anything wrong when they were recruiting Donnie,” Giles told KSR. “I have the utmost respect for [Jason Hart]. I think he’s unbelievable. I’ve known Coach Pope since he was at BYU. I don’t know if there’s a better person out there than Coach Pope. I absolutely loved talking to him at all the times we’ve had the opportunity to talk. I thought they were amazing.”

Giles said that Kentucky’s staff, from Pope to Hart, were diligent in their recruitment of Dent, especially as the team navigated an NCAA Tournament run. Despite his recruitment only lasting three days and his ultimate commitment to UCLA, Kentucky’s pursuit was felt.

“For Donnie, it was as simple as he just wanted to come back home. He wanted to be close to home,” Giles said.

UNLV guard transfer Dedan Thomas Jr. was another player Kentucky had conversations with in the transfer portal. His father, Dedan Thomas Sr., said things moved quickly before his commitment to LSU.

“I don’t think they could have done anything better. Honestly, Kentucky sells itself,” Thomas Sr. said. “I don’t even remember getting that far [in the NIL conversations], to tell you the truth. It might have been a week or two. I think we did one Zoom call and multiple phone calls. It was pretty fast.”

The NBA acumen of Mark Pope and Jason Hart, both having played in the league for multiple years, was brought up as a positive by some. Clint Parks, the Director of the CPSA Puma Pro16 AAU Program, has worked closely with Texas A&M signee Josh Irving. He was heavily involved in Irving’s recruitment this fall as Kentucky pursued a commitment.

Parks was adamant that Irving’s commitment wasn’t about anything Kentucky did wrong. It was more about what Texas A&M did right. 

“For Josh, it came down to him and his family feeling like Texas A&M was a better fit for him as a player and what he needed,” Parks said. “It wasn’t an indictment in any way on Kentucky.”

Negative Recruiting Hurts Pope 

Every program, at some point, becomes privy to negative recruiting directed toward it. However, at Kentucky under Mark Pope, those attacks have been amplified, particularly after key targets, notably Caleb Wilson, have gone elsewhere. 

“He’s getting negatively recruited against by several people,” one source said. “Caleb Wilson is a major one who is kind of hurting his reputation.”

When The Lexington Herald-Leader reported that Kentucky had spent $22 million on its 2025-26 roster, those attacks got even louder. Now, it’s been a major talking point on the recruiting trail, especially given how Kentucky has started the season with its 6-4 record and losses to Louisville, Michigan State, North Carolina, and Gonzaga.

“The $22 million talk, it’s true,” one source said. “My theory is that it was pushed internally from them, as well, and when you do that, you’re going to make a lot of people very envious, right or wrong. When you come up with a roster that isn’t meeting everybody’s expectations, and you go and do that, you’re going to get crapped on a little bit.”

While sources have been clear to differentiate Kentucky’s ongoing issues this recruiting cycle from the current struggles of the 2025-26 team, it’s all coming back to that $22 million number. UK has the most expensive roster in the country, but hasn’t seen a justifiable return on investment one month into the season. 

“He overpaid for this year’s roster by a lot, and it’s kind of showing in a way, his inexperience a little bit – whether it’s in a negotiation or understanding player market value or valuation,” one source said. “I think he’s struggling to understand how this higher level of college basketball, how the world works.”

Between this season’s struggles, negative recruiting toward Mark Pope, and the restrictions set forth by the new deal with JMI, Kentucky Basketball finds itself in an uphill battle on the recruiting trail, with not a lot of time left.